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More About This Title A Companion to Herman Melville
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- Presents 35 original essays by scholars from around the world, representing a range of different approaches to Melville
- Considers Melville in a global context, and looks at the impact of global economies and technologies on the way people read Melville
- Takes account of the latest and most sophisticated scholarship, including postcolonial and feminist perspectives
- Locates Melville in his cultural milieu, revising our views of his politics on race, gender and democracy
- Reveals Melville as a more contemporary writer than his critics have sometimes assumed
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Wyn Kelley is Senior Lecturer in the Literature Faculty at MIT. The author of Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (1996) and A Short Guide to Herman Melville (Blackwell Publishing, 2008), she is also Associate Editor of the Melville Electronic Library.
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List of Illustrations xi
Notes on Contributors xii
Acknowledgments xx
Texts and Abbreviations xxi
Preface
Wyn Kelley xxiii
Part I Travels 1
1 A Traveling Life
Laurie Robertson-Lorant 3
2 Cosmopolitanism and Traveling Culture
Peter Gibian 19
3 Melville's World Readers
A. Robert Lee 35
4 Global Melville
Paul Lyons 52
Part II Geographies 69
5 Science and the Earth
Bruce A. Harvey 71
6 Ships, Whaling, and the Sea
Mary K. Bercaw Edwards 83
7 Pacific Paradises
Alex Calder 98
8 Atlantic Trade
Hester Blum 113
9 Ancient Lands
Basem L. Ra'ad 129
Part III Nations 147
10 Democracy and its Discontents
Dennis Berthold 149
11 Urbanization, Class Struggle, and Reform
Carol Colatrella 165
12 Wicked Books: Melville and Religion
Hilton Obenzinger 181
13 Pierre's Bad Associations: Public Life in the Institutional Nation
Christopher Castiglia 197
14 Melville, Slavery, and the American Dilemma
John Stauffer 214
15 Gender and Sexuality
Leland S. Person 231
Part IV Libraries 247
16 The Legacy of Britain
Robin Grey 249
17 Romantic Philosophy, Transcendentalism, and Nature
Rachela Permenter 266
18 Literature of Exploration and the Sea
R. D. Madison 282
19 Death and Literature: Melville and the Epitaph
Edgar A. Dryden 299
20 The Company of Women Authors
Charlene Avallone 313
21 Hawthorne and Race
Ellen Weinauer 327
22 "Unlike Things Must Meet and Mate": Melville and the Visual Arts
Robert K. Wallace 342
Part V Texts 363
23 The Motive for Metaphor: Typee, Omoo, and Mardi
Geoffrey Sanborn 365
24 Artist at Work: Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, and Pierre
Cindy Weinstein 378
25 The Language of Moby-Dick: "Read It If You Can"
Maurice S. Lee 393
26 Threading the Labyrinth: Moby-Dick as Hybrid Epic
Christopher Sten 408
27 The Female Subject in Pierre and The Piazza Tales
Caroline Levander 423
28 Narrative Shock in "Bartleby, the Scrivener," "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," and "Benito Cereno"
Marvin Fisher 435
29 Fluid Identity in Israel Potter and The Confidence-Man
Gale Temple 451
30 How Clarel Works
Samuel Otter 467
31 Melville the Realist Poet
Elizabeth Renker 482
32 Melville's Transhistorical Voice: Billy Budd, Sailor and the Fragmentation of Forms
John Wenke 497
Part VI Meanings 513
33 The Melville Revival
Sanford E. Marovitz 515
34 Creating Icons: Melville in Visual Media and Popular Culture
Elizabeth Schultz 532
35 The Melville Text
John Bryant 553
Index 567
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"This book does not focus on one particular Melville book, short story, or poem but instead offers a new examination of the latest in Melville criticism...These fine essays advance Melville scholarship for the 21st century."—Choice
“A beautifully produced substantial volume.”—Reference Reviews
